Dense output for strong stability preserving Runge-Kutta methods (Q2014317)

Strong stability preserving (SSP) Runge-Kutta (RK) methods are frequently used in the time discretization of hyperbolic conservation laws. Preservation of certain solution properties like monotonicity, contractivity, positivity and maximum principles are ensured by SSP methods. It is known that an RK method may be augmented with a dense output formula, sometimes known as a continuous extension. An advantage of this augmentation is to avoid the need to stop precisely at the output times and can be used to obtain output at arbitrary times, without any additional function computations. The authors investigate dense output formulae for explicit SSP RK methods. The imposition of the SSP property is shown to be a strong and restrictive requirement in the sense that there is no SSP dense output formula of order three or higher. It is also shown that for many SSP techniques, such methods of order one or two may be constructed in a simple manner.